you have to be a little bit crazy to survive

Modern-day science station anomaly

I was part of an elite, armed investigative team going into an ocean-side science station to find out what had happened to it. Only the first part of the station was on land, the rest of which was located underwater, and it was connected by corridors, stairs, and elevators. The first section had bad lighting, papers and equipment scattered everywhere, and finally we started finding bodies as we went into the underwater sections.

The group was split up at some point, and one of the other smaller groups was attacked. A girl survived her initial injuries and we had her resting at the makeshift medical room we set up. My sub-group did some more exploring and had an encounter with another of the things that had attacked her, and they were freakish humanoid forms with weird delicate-seeming spikes and rings of almost barbed-wire shaped protrusions all over their faces.

I don't think I actually managed to kill it, but I was able to clear an area and noticed a map on the wall. It showed a side view of the complex with each area marked as a white rectangle with connections between each section. There were only about four or five sections and it didn't seem to go as far down as it could, more outwards into the ocean water. There was also a second floor section about half-way between the initial entry area and one of the sections out in the water, but I had a feeling the source of the problems was down and not up. I was trying to figure out how to get to the next section further into the water, but ended up going back to where the majority of our people were for the moment.

The girl in the medical room started showing signs of changing into one of the creatures. Stuff was beginning to grow out of her face and she started screaming as the changes became more severe. At some point she calmed down and dazedly suggested she go further into the complex alone, because maybe the creatures would leave her alone now that she was becoming like them. I had a bad feeling she was hurting so bad, she was in fact planning suicide by putting herself at the mercy of the enemy.

She became too disoriented to use for the plan, but one of our big marines was showing signs of changing too, yet he had not been bitten or injured. Did that mean the virulent creature DNA was somehow airborne? His changes weren't as severe, but he had a weird line of almost stitch-looking spines set flush into his skin, that traveled from roughly his chin up across his cheeks to his forehead on both sides of his face. He suggested he should try the plan for getting further into the complex without getting eaten.

My perspective shifted to the marine, and he had already made it much further and deeper into the complex. This area appeared to have been built into solid ground, the shallow end of the ocean floor. I could see a bunch of the creatures ahead, and as they started rushing towards me I thought the plan was going to fail after all. But they slowed down, and then started walking up the side of a ridge of nearby dirt. I had a headset on, and I said over the communications to the rest of the team, "I think they're trying to show me something."

The ridge of packed dirt was taller than me, so it took climbing it to see what lay beyond. I beheld a huge crater, so gigantic it nearly broke my brain and gave me vertigo. But I held my place and tried to figure out what had happened here. The shape of the crater almost made it feel like a ridiculously-huge sphere had once rested here, but really it must have been the end result of a huge excavation. I didn't remember seeing anything like this on the wall map, because a room this size would have dwarfed the scale used in that map. Thus, it was some kind of mega-secret project that had ended up killing a lot of people and turned the rest into aliens.

At the very bottom of the crater I could see what looked like a small exposed edge of dirty, beige-colored metal. Was that part of an alien craft? How come it had not been excavated fully? Had they found other pieces before reaching that one, or was the alien DNA so nasty that it had affected people almost immediately once they started uncovering that piece? Maybe it was some kind of space-microbe on the outside of a ship and nobody had even seen what else lay beneath the dirt.

Back at the command center the team had set up, there were lines of chat on a screen that had been sent from the marine (so much for the audio signal idea). The first two were something along the lines of "Here goes nothing." and "[soldier's name], signing off." Suddenly a new line appeared, in all caps, and it was maybe ten letters smooshed together that indicated the man was still conscious and still at least someone in charge of his own mind.

Then I was Mei in Overwatch, where I was using my ice-blast gun to freeze and kill the alien creatures and they gave experience points every time they died. I was keeping up with respawn so I only had to kill one or two at a time and not a whole room. And finally I woke up.

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Thoughts: I would have liked to have left the end off, but it just kind of shows how doofy the subconscious can be. I had a great, freaky, dark theme going on there, thanks dream! :P I really do wish I could remember what exactly the lines of text were, I almost think part of the last one was "IAMGOOD" but I'm not sure. I also vaguely remember something coming up about depressurization at one point but I am not sure where that fell into the dream and it was most likely one of the more messed up parts of dream logic.